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John Williamson Nevin on the Atonement: How the Eucharist Brings Atonement Home

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John Williamson Nevin on the Atonement: How the Eucharist Brings Atonement Home John Williamson Nevin on the Atonement: How the Eucharist Brings Atonement Home Through Union Roth Prize Submission The Mercersburg Theology Society By Dan Glover Vancouver, British Columbia Spring, 2019 1 Some theologians find the atonement theology of American “high church Calvinist,” John Williamson Nevin (1803-1886), deficient.1 This charge arose in debates with Charles Hodge (1797-1878) over the theology of the Lord’s Supper. Nevin defended Calvin and the Reformed tradition’s sacramental understanding of the Supper; Hodge argued for a basically Zwinglian memorialist position.2 As both men detailed their understandings of the eucharist, the argument drew in the entirety of their respective theologies.3 Each one’s understanding of communion was ultimately based on what he considered to be the centre of Christian faith: the satisfaction theory of the atonement for Hodge, and the incarnation for Nevin.4 Nevin characterizes the conflict: “What [Hodge] is offended with is the conception of sacramental religion, as distinguished from a religion of mere individual spirituality….Justification by faith and sacramental grace are, in his view, incompatible conceptions.”5 Because Nevin disagreed that the satisfaction theory of the atonement was the central principle of the Christian faith, Hodge and others have judged his theology of the atonement, and by implication his entire theological system, as dangerously deficient if not outright heretical. However, Nevin’s theology of the atonement must be considered within his overarching 1 D. G. Hart, John Williamson Nevin: High Church Calvinist (Phillipsburg: Presbyterian & Reformed, 2005), “high church Calvinist” is Hart’s description. 2 W. Bradford Littlejohn, The Mercersburg Theology and the Quest for Reformed Catholicity (Eugene: Pickwick, 2009), 40-55. See John Williamson Nevin, The Mystical Presence and The Doctrine of the Reformed Church on the Lord’s Supper, Linden J. DeBie, ed. (Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 2012), 40-91 for historical evidence of Reformed position. 3 Littlejohn, Mercersburg Theology, 56-87. 4 B.A. Gerrish, Thinking with the Church: Essays in Historical Theology (Grand Rapids/Cambridge: Eerdmans, 2010), 183 and 201 respectively. 5 Linden J. DeBie, Speculative Theology and Common-Sense Religion: Mercersburg and the Conservative Roots of American Religion (Eugene: Pickwick, 2008), 88. 1 2 incarnational theology. His critique of the American Protestantism of his day was essentially a critique of its insufficient doctrine of the incarnation and the believer’s union with Christ, which resulted in an unbalanced atonement theology, and erroneous views of the church and sacraments. Nevin’s own doctrine of the atonement must be understood in light of his efforts to correct the severely deficient Christology, and through it the ecclesiology and sacramentology, of his interlocutors rather than viewed as a systematic, comprehensive and nuanced statement of everything he believed on the atonement. In this light, Nevin’s theology of atonement, even if not articulated exhaustively, may be understood as orthodox and broadly Reformed. Because of the centrality of the incarnation and union with Christ for his entire theology, it is impossible to isolate the atonement from everything else Nevin discusses.6 After outlining Nevin’s incarnation-centric theology for context, I will examine some of his specific statements on the atonement. We will discover that Nevin sought to restore the atonement to its proper place in the economy of redemption and the life of the church by grounding it upon the enduring incarnate God-man, Jesus Christ, and the church’s union with him. We will further see that Nevin views the eucharist as the main (though not only) place where the incarnate Christ actualizes his atoning work in the church through communication of his own life and person. John Williamson Nevin’s views of the atonement must be considered within his doctrine of the incarnation of Christ, the center and ground of his entire theology. “‘The Word become flesh!’ In this simple, but sublime enunciation,” Nevin declares, “we have the whole gospel comprehended in a word…. The incarnation is the key that unlocks the sense of all God’s 6 Christianity is a “life,” not a “doctrinal system”; Nevin, Mystical Presence, 186-87. 2 3 revelations.”7 The incarnation is “the principle” and “true measure and test” of Christianity, the “fact of all facts” and the “centre and hinge of all history.”8 For Nevin, all Christian theology is a subset of Christology; every aspect of theology must be related to the hypostatic union of the eternal Logos and humanity in the person of Christ. It is the “absolute unity of the divine and the human in his person” which is the “last ground of Christianity” and to which it owes “its distinctive character.”9 Nevin recognized in American Protestantism a “failure to afford the incarnation its proper place as the nexus for…all genuine Christian theology.”10 Indeed, this was the spirit of Antichrist, causing all kinds of sectarian divisions in the American church.11 He further discerned that “behind all doctrinal aberrations and heresies in the history of the Christian Church is a failure to reckon fully with the all-embracing reality of God assuming flesh in and as Jesus Christ.”12 “Christ’s embodiment” has “massive mediatorial and redemptive implications”13 to which neither the revivalist Arminian theology of Charles Finney, nor the moralism of New England Calvinism, nor the scholastic federal Calvinism of Hodge, all based 7 Quoted in Marcus Peter Johnson, One With Christ: An Evangelical Theology of Salvation (Wheaton: Crossway, 2013), 82. 8 Quoted in Richard J. Mouw and Douglas A. Sweeney, The Suffering and Victorious Christ: Toward a More Compassionate Christology (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2013), 21. See also William DiPuccio, The Interior Sense of Scripture: The Sacred Hermeneutics of John W. Nevin (Macon: Mercer, 1998), 25-26. 9 Nevin, Mystical Presence, 27. 10 Marcus P. Johnson, “The Word Became Flesh: John Williamson Nevin, Charles Hodge, and The Antichrist,” vol. 2 of Evangelical Calvinism: Dogmatics and Devotion, ed. Myk Habets and Bobby Grow (Eugene: Pickwick, 2017), 60. 11 John Williamson Nevin, “Antichrist,” in The Anxious Bench (second edition), Antichrist, and the Sermon Catholic Unity. Edited by Augustine Thompson, OP (Eugene: Wipf and Stock, no publication date). 12 Johnson, “The Word Became Flesh,” 60. 13 Ibid., 61-62, 3 4 upon individualistic common sense rationalistic philosophy, does justice. Against these, Nevin proposed a robust incarnation-centred ecclesial and sacramental theology in which “the invisible Word became flesh, and through that flesh brings God to us and us to God.”14 For Nevin, the incarnation is the central fact in all reality. Against the prevalent individualist and “nonchurchly” views of “relationship with Christ in external and contractual terms,” Nevin proposed a theology of union with Christ.15 This union is not merely moral or legal, but the “reception of [Christ’s] life,” expressed in and mediated through the church in its ministry of the Word and sacraments. In this way, “the life of Christ [is] located in his people, the church.”16 This new life is spiritual and mystical; it is “a real communion with the person of Christ…effected by the Holy Spirit through faith.”17 This living- union with Christ is sustained, through faith, by receiving Christ’s own “life-giving flesh.” This union is ever more deeply actualized in believers through the eucharist. Although figural or spiritual, it is nevertheless real. For Nevin, “there is an ‘efflux’ from Christ that lodges itself in the inmost core of our personality and becomes the ‘seed’ of our sanctification.”18 Nevin saw a vacuum at the center of American Protestant theology where he believed the incarnation ought to be. He lamented that many presentations of the gospel would not be 14 Ibid., 66. 15 Robert Letham, Union with Christ: In Scripture, History, and Theology (Phillipsburg: Presbyterian & Reformed, 2011), 121. 16 Ibid., 121-122. 17 Ibid. 18 B.A. Gerrish, Grace and Gratitude: The Eucharistic Theology of John Calvin (Eugene: Wipf & Stock), 4. 4 5 “materially affected if Christ were not presently incarnate.”19 People focussed on Christ’s saving work and benefits but neglected his person. Where Hodge viewed the incarnation as a necessary condition for accomplishing atonement and justification, Nevin believed that the incarnation was the true basis of our relationship with God, and the atoning death of Christ was necessary because the divine Logos had become incarnate into a fallen world and a sinful humanity.20 Following the Church Fathers and Aquinas more than scholastic reformed theologians, Nevin believed that “Jesus’ incarnation is not simply a compulsory mechanism of the atonement” but “the fundamental need and longing of creation itself…to be raised into a higher order of existence…the moral and ontological ascension of humanity into the life of God.”21 Salvation is not merely transactional, therefore, but relational, mystical, ontological. “Christ communicates his own life substantially to the soul on which he acts, causing it to grow into his very nature. This is the mystical union; the basis of our whole salvation….”22 The atonement and justification were not ultimate, in other words, but stood on the incarnation and served the greater end of our union with God in the incarnate Christ. This doctrinal arrangement troubles some of Nevin’s interpreters. Some think Nevin denied forensic, imputed righteousness by his insistence on real, organic union with Christ and a resulting principle of growth in inherent righteousness – this was a charge leveled by Hodge and others in his day. However, Nevin merely grounded legal righteousness on organic union with, 19 Johnson, “Word Became Flesh,” 64. 20 Nevin, Mystical Presence, 147-48. 21 Adam S. Borneman, Church, Sacrament, and American Democracy: The Social and Political Dimensions of John Williamson Nevin’s Theology of Incarnation (Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 2011), 94.
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